My Distro Is Better Than Your Distro

I was hanging out in ##linux on Freenode this morning, willing to help anyone out who needed it, and I came smack into the middle of an argument about why Gentoo is the best distribution in the world, and Debian is the worst. As the conversation progressed, it was clear that the one running Gentoo had never touched a Debian system, or was even half-way familiar with its structure. He was claiming that Debian mucks up the vanilla source code, breaks things, and Debian is now a business. It became immediately clear that his knowledge of GNU/Linux has been entirely limited to Gentoo, and he was suffering a bit from fanboy-ism. This person continued with is anti-Debian pro-Gentoo rhetoric until he was banned from the channel.

Grow up! People, please! For the love of everything good and holy, we're in this together. Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware, Ubuntu, whatever. We're all part of the same ecosystem that keeps us loving what we do. We've "drank the Kool-Aid" so-to-speak. We all know what it's like to free our Microsoft bonds and run a Free system. It's fun. It's invigorating. It gives us bad grades in college, because we don't do our homework and hack instead (I don't speak from personal experience. Maybe. :)) So, why the hate? I understand the occasional teasing and poking fun. In fact, even a quality argument about different aspects of distributions of software is appropriate. But when the argument turns emotional and personal, and attacks are made, generalizations brought out, and all-in-all a pissing contest, then I don't understand it. Why?

Ubuntu is my personal choice of distribution with Debian coming in second. I'd run Fedora third, with CentOS fourth. openSUSE would come in fifth probably with Slackware and the free BSDs not far behind. I don't know much about many distributions, such as Gentoo or Foresight, but I'm willing to give them a try. Keeping myself open to trying new distros, coupled with learning what makes them tick, gives me the upper hand. Taking on a fanboy attitude, claiming my distro is the best, get me nowhere. Putting down other distributions get me nowhere. Generalizations get me nowhere.

I know happens a lot and will keep happening. Personally I dual boot with linux as my primary operating system. I'm a user that loves proprietary drivers. Yet I'm still running the free operating system that I love. Nothing wrong with that right? Linux ftw!

I don't know which OS is the most technically superior, I like the idea of gentoo if it was centralized compilation (binary distribution for almost every processor model)..
..but I do think that the Ubuntu brand, community, and Canonical are in a position to make a serious difference, for whatever reason.

When people start comparing distributions, my response usually is that different distros have their strengths!! I usually break it down into the following, and encourage people to try out as many as possible, and select something that they are comfortable with (this doesn't mean that I won't tease them for their final choices, but that's just in jest!!):

Gentoo: the ebuild system is great to use if you are an upstream developer
Ubuntu: fantastic community support, so it's awesome for home users, and those that are new to the foss ecosystem
Redhat / Fedora: if you need to use enterprise software, such as oracle etc...
SLES / openSUSE: if you need to integrate into MS & Novell environments

Personally, I run Ubuntu on everything, with the exception of an XBox, which runs gentoo, as that's the only thing that I can find which works and can be brought up to date easily (but painfully slowly)!!!

People should make the same argument for all the other potential flame wars, eg emacs/vi/gedit/etc... or gnome/kde/xfce/enlightenment/etc... Focus on the strengths of a product and whether the user is comfortable within that environment!!

The best distro is the one that works for you! I am glad to have choice. The more choice the better.

BTW, I use Ubuntu, but don't think that it is the best choice for everybody. It works for me and that is good enough. If you use something else, that is fine by me. The day that everyone uses the same distro will be a sad day indeed.

This is a major problem for the growth of Linux. Linux users should unite, no matter what their personal choice of distro is. The in-fighting is bad for Linux and Open Source. We have to remember our common enemy: The proprietary OS companies.

BTW, since this thing can't detect my distro, it's PCLinuxOS. I guess it only detects the major distros?

I basically agree that Gentoo is the best distro out there. But I'm running Ubuntu. What does that say? I guess there's different values of "best". Ubuntu is significantly easier, which makes it better for most users. Myself, apparently, included.

P.S. Why do I get an error message "You must submit a comment using the comment form." when I try to submit this comment? Seems the OpenID implementation is broken

Aaron, be sure to have a look at Foresight Linux. I see that you already have experience with several families (deb, rpm…) but not that much with Foresight Linux so I can only recommend that you try it

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